I know what you’re thinking. Why on Earth would you want more push notifications? But Hooks is an app that specialises in notifications that you’d actually want, and it can focus on almost anything.
Up until now, Hooks was only available on iOS — now, Android and Apple Watch users can grab it.
To be fair, most of the time, these annoyances are for things you don’t want to know about. Thanks, Twitter, I didn’t need to know that a few of my friends followed someone random. Great, Farmville, I’m aware that you really want me to come back and play you, but we talked about this and the answer is no.
Hooks is different — it takes actual events happening in the world, and sends notifications for those things. In effect, it canvasses and curates the news, responding to alarms that you’ve programmed into it.
If you’re out on the town and your football team is about to start a match in 30 minutes, that is an acceptable time for a push notification. Maybe you want to know when a new episode of Better Call Saul has aired, or when the price of one Bitcoin drops below $US200.
It doesn’t look like you can actually program in these alarms; it’s more a case of choosing from an absolute tonne of them. That means a lot of scrolling through the available options, because I’ve found that the search function won’t always yield what you want.
But there are some very handy templates to start you out — for example, just selecting “icy” from the weather section, and then specifying Sydney. Or perhaps I want to know if this very website goes down — that’s as simple as choosing the “website down” template and putting in this URL. There are quite a few templates to choose from.
You can check out Hooks for Android here, and it’s also available on Apple Watch.
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